Saturday, May 03, 2008

Last Wednesday, I performed my annual gig at the Very Special Arts Festival at the Los Angeles Music Center. It took me back in time, to ten years ago when I taught the art of mime to school kids. One day while teaching at a school with "normal" kids I had a "unifying experience" when everyone in the room saw the "magic hand" that materialized right in front of our very eyes...

3 comments:

Lance,You nailed it... again.You have this way with making stuff say more than the words themselves.Nuances.Metaphors.I have to assume it is that, rather than me hearing things that are not there.Or maybe it's a combination of storyteller and listener.You said something along the lines of "wanting to be with people who are not repulsed or afraid of you".That's how I feel.Not physically, of course, but spiritually.It's funny because it's true.Dude, loved it.Great piece.It's art.It enriched our day, and our lives.And I am not being a sycophant, honest.Thank you for recording and posting.Once again, I am going to have to listen to it several times to get all I can out of it.There are layers within it that cannot be experienced in one listening.Kudos.

This one had just about everything...strangely I missed the singing & thought to myself when it was over what song would have fit.

There is a lot of tension built up during the preparation--the stuff about evaluating a school (how the leader behaves defines the behavior of the group), the sixteen candles stuff about which kid is the clown, the brain, etc., and even your kind of apathetic approach to the event that caused the flash back--I was expecting tragedy. Like you picked him and some other kid was gonna yell out "he cannot do it, he does not have a HAND" or something.

I like the way your story turned out. I liked the somewhat spiritual touch at the end--the recognition of the value of shared experience. I had not really thought about Physical Dramas ability to produce that kind of state--I find it more in music or literature. Food for thought. And perhaps the fact that a song did not happen at the end allowed me to live in those thoughts longer then I otherwise may have.

Magic Mountain and the White Flight was nice LA touch as well.

Did you consider using a song for this piece? What would it be if you had to go back and add one?

Rating/Warning...

Don't believe the hype...

"As a listener, one can hope that more Swedish podcaster daring exploit media opportunities for experimental forms. In the U.S. there are shows like... Verge of the Fringe where Lance Anderson tells anecdotes with stunning fragmented and cluttered feeling." ~ Hanna Fahl of

"In a way, it was a distant echo of the Swedish podcast radio breakthrough in England six years earlier.

It was in February 2006 in Los Angeles podcast pioneer Lance Anderson became the first in the world to record a podcast live.»The Lance Anderson Podcast Experiment« today appears as an almost epochal public relations campaign for the podcast phenomenon - a sold pubframträdande in Liverpool, a sold podcast revue at Edge Hill University and the attraction of the world's first major academic podcast seminar at Cambridge University, all in the space of three days." (Google Translation of the Swedish weekly magazine Fokus)